(Entry was posted by Roderic Van Binst on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 10/30/2014).

Checking HTML sitemaps for 404 errors and redirects.

Hi all,

What`s an easy way to check HTML sitemap for 404 errors or redirects?
Need to check a rather large one which would take a while to check manually (one by one).

Cheers?

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Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Roderic Van Binst: Hi all,

What's an easy way to check HTML sitemap for 404 errors or redirects?
Need to check a rather large one which would take a while to check manually (one by one).

Cheers
SEMXE: +Roderic Van Binst ;One way could be to check website for broken links via some tools and remove those pages with errors from the sitemap.
Roderic Van Binst: Yes, usually I use Screaming Frog for these things. However when I do check the URL of the HTML Sitemap only (and by looking at Out Links) it gives me way more info including images and what not. ;

Unless there's a different (and easier) way to do this with Screaming Frog?
Jim Munro: I'm no expert but I think you might be overthinking it, +Roderic Van Binst ;and using time that might be better spent elsewhere.

A sitemap is useful but it's not a contract between you and googlebot. It won't do any harm if it's wrong, it just won't be as useful as it could be.

I would just drop this sitemap and create a new one that hopefully will contain no errors. All you want to include is the bare minimum, robots pay no attention to anything else bar the urls AFAIK.
Unipro Education Pvt. Ltd - Digital Marketing Agency: You can use tool like "Screaming frog " to generate list of all 404 pages. Xenu is also a great tool for 404 error correction.
Jim Munro: I haven't looked at this but it's by +Tony McCreath ;so it must be good.

If you're still dead keen to look over your 404's it will do that, apparently. If you just want to build a new clean sitemap it will do that too, apparently. It's free and works on a windows box.

https://websiteadvantage.com.au/Website-Link-Checker ;
Tony McCreath: Thanks +Jim Munro. ; ;That's a very old tool so no guarantees on how well it works. I think Screaming Frog does that sort of thing well.
Dave Elliott: yeah screaming frog does it well.

http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide#How_to_check_my_existing_Sitemap
Daniel Lloyd Barrett: Xenu is my preferred tool